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Lost Spitalfields

October 16, 2024
by the gentle author


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Looking towards Spitalfields from Aldgate East

London can be a grief-inducing city. Everyone loves the London they first knew, whether as the place they grew up or the city they arrived in. As the years pass, this city bound with your formative experience changes, bearing less and less resemblance to the place you discovered. Your London is taken from you. Your sense of loss grows until eventually your memory of the London you remember becomes more vivid than the London you see before you and you become a stranger in the place that you know best. This is what London can do to you.

In Spitalfields, the experience has been especially poignant in recent years with the redevelopment of the Fruit & Vegetable Market, the Fruit & Wool Exchange and Norton Folgate. Yet these photographs reveal another Spitalfields that only a few remember, this is lost Spitalfields.

Spital Sq was an eighteenth century square linking Bishopsgate with the market that was destroyed within living memory, existing now only as a phantom presence in these murky old photographs and in the fond remembrance of senior East Enders. On the eastern side of Spitalfields, the nineteenth century terraces of Mile End New Town were erased in ‘slum clearances’ and replaced with blocks of social housing while, to the north, the vast Bishopsgate Goodsyard was burned to the ground in a fire that lasted for days in 1964.

Yet contemplating the history of loss in Spitalfields sets even these events within a sobering perspective. Only a feint pencil sketch of the tower records the Priory of St Mary which stood upon the site of Spital Sq until Henry VIII ‘dissolved’ it and turned the land into his artillery ground. Constructing the Eastern Counties Railway in the eighteen-thirties destroyed hundreds of homes and those residents who were displaced moved into Shoreditch, creating the overcrowded neighbourhood which became known as the Old Nichol. And it was a process that was repeated when the line was extended down to Liverpool St. Meanwhile, Commercial St was cut through Spitalfields from Aldgate to Shoreditch to transport traffic more swiftly from the docks, wreaking destruction through densely inhabited streets in the mid-nineteenth century.

So look back at these elegiac photos of what was lost in Spitalfields before your time, reconcile yourself to the loss of the past and brace yourself for the future that is arriving.

Spital Sq, only St Botolph’s Hall on the right survives today

Spital Sq photographed in 1909

Church Passage, Spital Sq, 1733, photographed in 1909 – only the market buildings survive.

17 Spital Sq, 1725

25 Spital Sq, 1733

23 Spital Sq, 1733

20 Spital Sq, 1723

20 Spital Sq, 1723

20 Spital Sq, 1732

32 Spital Sq, 1739

 

32 Spital Sq, 1739

5 Whites Row, 1714

6/7 Spring Walk, 1819

Buxton St, 1850

Buxton St, 1850

Former King Edward Institution, 1864, Deal St

36 Crispin St, 1713

7 Wilkes St, 1722

10 & 11 Norton Folgate, 1810 – photographed in 1909

Norton Folgate Court House, Folgate St,  photographed in 1909

52 & 9a Artillery Passage, 1680s

Bishopsgate Goods Station, 1881

Shepherd’s Place arch, 1820, leading to Tenter St – photographed 1909

You may also like to read about

The Haggerston Nobody Knows

The Lost Squares of Stepney

4 Responses leave one →
  1. Marcia Howard permalink
    October 16, 2024

    Now one of those little houses on Buxton Street would suit me just fine! Although I grew up in Chelsea and not the East End, our childhood playgrounds back in the 1950s were bombsites, although forbidden by our parents to go near them, but we were streetwise and lived in a great Community, everyone having gone through the same experiences, and there for each other if you needed help. I treasure those memories, and more so, when walking around the area of Sloane Square near my old schools, I know exactly where and who I am.

  2. October 16, 2024

    Your words have resonated with me! I grew up in Brixton in the 50s and 60s but have not been back since. So much demolition and rebuilding took place in the 1980s that I scarcely recognise the place in recent photographs. I should very much like to visit but it’s that fear of feeling disorientated and possibly losing my pictorial memories that prevents me. Perhaps I shouldn’t leave it too much longer.

  3. Milo permalink
    October 16, 2024

    I’ve just been watching one of those Youtube channels where people wander London with a camera and I sat tremulously through a trip around my old ‘manor’ (Westbourne grove/Queensway) So many new places and names yet…I could smell the sharp smell of diesel, I could feel the cooling weather, I could literally place myself hurrying down the road to my warm flat, past all those same buildings… It’s still there and always will be and when I get back next I’ll be wandering the streets I love and wishing and regretting same as millions of others have. It’s home to the core of my soul.

  4. October 16, 2024

    The loss of Spitalfields Square is to be lamented. On a lighter note, I wonder what the man in the centre of the first photograph beneath your text is carrying on his head.

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